The Weather Report
April 15, 2004
Column by Brandon Copple

Do The Hustle

Game-time Weather: 40° Winds NNE at 22mph.

Yesterday was Opening Day at Wrigley Field. After the game I wrote two drunken haikus:

Cubs Park in the Spring
Cubs Park in the Spring
Sound of July, air of March
The sad Blue flag flies

Seventh Inning Chill
Seventh inning chill
Wind blows in; toes numb; fuck this
Going to the bar

~ ~ ~

The Hustle

"Yankee and voyageur, the Irish and the Dutch, Indian traders and Indian agents, halfbreed and quarterbreed and no breed at all, in the final counting they were all of a single breed. They all had Hustler’s blood." – Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

Back home, out in the high-plains town that reared me, a two-story sprawl of Victorians and trailer parks, cattlemen and wetbacks and good neighbors and wind ...out there some of my neighbors have been reintroduced to The Hustle.

He was a local guy, maybe not born-and-bred but been-around, well known and pretty much liked. A computer whiz, they said, a sharp kid who developed some kind of cattle-tracking device, some chip that would trace an animal’s journey from birth to feedlot to slaughter.

The kid had sold some software to the government for $1 million, so folks figured he knew what he was doing. I hear he raised somewhere around half-a-million bucks for the cattle-chip venture.

And then, of course, he skipped town. One day he was gone and folks started thinking about what he’d been telling them. Did anybody know for a fact that the government had paid $1 million for this kid’s software? Had anybody seen the patent on this microchip?

Nobody had, because there was no patent, nor a microchip. The kid made it all up and then he beat it before anybody caught on. Now the FBI is looking for him, and they’ll probably find him, although the duped investors aren’t likely to get their money back. Nor are they likely to get any satisfaction from the justice system. The kid may go up the river, but The Hustle is irreversible.

And it won’t be any comfort for the good folks of my hometown when I say what I’m about to. But this isn’t the first time they’ve been taken, not by a long shot. In fact, my little Kansas town owes its very existence to The Hustle, as do so many towns in our great Republic.

This is a country built on the hustle, the swindle, the double-cross – from the Dutch who stole Manhattan to the MBAs who built Enron, The Hustler has been there every step, sometimes central in our history, more often lurking at the edges, watching for an easy touch, a fast profit and a clean getaway.

This is a theme explored in great depth in historian Walter McDougall’s new book about The Hustle. The book is called Freedom Just Around the Corner. I haven’t read it, and I don’t plan to (it weighs in at over 600 pages, and I don’t read books that are too heavy to hurl across the room in disgust). But from what I understand, McDougall’s tome is the first comprehensive U.S. history to explain the role of The Hustle in every chapter of that history.

I share McDougall’s view that the role of The Hustle was, like the role of war, essential, but I don’t need him to tell me why. It’s obvious.

A good hustler looks for an easy mark, every one of whom has two qualities: greed and naiveté. Americans are up to their ears in either and both. We are an idealistic, trusting people who also want to grab all we can on our way through. Our moralism is loud, but capitalism is what gets us up and out the door.

I’m not the first to say this. Forty years ago Nelson Algren wrote about Chicago as a hustlers’ capital, a frontier town where the streets got paved but the fix stayed in, a city where civic reform made the politicians rich. But while Chicago may be the grandest city on the make, it’s not the only one.

Which brings us back to my hometown. Long before the cattle-chip scam, it was settled by land speculators, sharpies who dug ditches, named them after rivers and sold the irrigated plots to settlers, sight unseen. And before that, the first American hustler passed through, not far from where I was born.

The hustler’s name was the Turk. He was a Kanza Indian who had been captured and made a slave by a tribe in New Mexico. There, in 1540, the Turk encountered 300 Spanish conquistadors and their leader Gen. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. In between slaughtering the New Mexico Indians, Coronado and his men had been asking for directions to Quivira, a fabled city of gold.

Hearing this, the Turk approached Coronado. The Turk described his home on the plains, a village where the streets were paved in jewels. As fast as Coronado could put on his pointy helmet, he and his 300 men headed northeast, toward the bejeweled Quivira, guided by the Turk. (He was called the Turk because the Spaniards thought he looked like, you know, a Turk.)

The Turk led them northeast out of the desert, onto the High Plains and across what we now know as Southwest Kansas, my home.

The Hustle? Only half-conceived. The Turk brilliantly identified his mark. Coronado was greedy and naïve. The Turk wanted to escape slavery and return to his people. He saw how easy it would be to get there with an escort from the gold-crazy Spaniards. But he had no exit strategy.

Still, the Turk damn near made it. The expedition had traveled close to 750 miles before the Spaniards grasped the enormity of The Hustle: There was no Quivira, no city of gold amidst the endless tall grass. Just a desperate Indian trying to get home.

Coronado realized he’d been hustled. It was irreversible. But he ordered the Turk’s execution anyway.

And thus, somewhere in what would become Central Kansas, almost dead in the center of what would become the United States of America, the first American hustler was strangled to death by his pigeons.

Not that the Turk is a man to be admired. He did something reprehensible, even to a hustler. He got caught.

~ ~ ~

The List

I read a story about how Google has become part of the vernacular. What a phenomenon. Three years ago I was still using Yahoo. Today I have the Google toolbar and use it, a lot, probably up to 10 times a day. Any curiosity, no matter how minor (or major), can now be vanquished in a matter of seconds. Best of all, for every curiosity satisfied, Google will arouse half-a-dozen more.

Here’s a list of things I’ve seen or found on Google in recent weeks:
• Congressional testimony by a guy I’m writing a story about
• 1 acre-foot of water is equal to 325,851 gallons
• There is a product called Forbid that will make your dog stop eating shit
• How to spell Jackie Joyner-Kersee
• An old friend from junior high hit .422 in a Nebraska softball league last summer
• Prohibition lasted from 1919-1933 (this info was harder to find than my old buddy’s batting average)
• Where to watch NCAA tournament games on Marco Island, Fla.
• All that crap about The Turk above
• Photos of Shiprock in New Mexico
• The Illinois Criminal Code’s definition of aggravated criminal sexual abuse

(Brandon Copple is a volunteer staff writer for 2Walls Webzine and the co-owner of two small dogs.)